spacestationtrustfund 's review for:

Au temps des requins et des sauveurs by Kawai Strong Washburn

2.0

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I wanted to like this book a lot more than I ended up doing. The concept and the characters were absolutely amazing, and the first maybe 50-80 pages were absolutely amazing, and the inciting incident was absolutely amazing, and then it just... wasn't. The themes buoyed the story considerably, creating a magical-realism world enmeshed in traditional Polynesian mythology and the indigenous culture of Hawaiʻi, but I'm not a fan of the Chosen One narrative (sorry I'm not from the core anglosphere I guess) and I'm not a fan of overtly religious saviour narratives. The prose and the mythology were the strongest aspects of the novel.